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ILLUMINANT SURGICAL INC

Address

855 EL CAMINO REAL STE 13A215
PALO ALTO, CA, 94301-2305
USA

UEI: WFETJLHB6MQ4

Number of Employees: 7

HUBZone Owned: No

Woman Owned: No

Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No

SBIR/STTR Involvement

Year of first award: 2024

Phase I Awards

Phase II Awards

100%

Conversion Rate

$569,857

Phase I Dollars

$2,357,943

Phase II Dollars

$2,927,800

Total Awarded

Awards

Up to 10 of the most recent awards are being displayed. To view all of this company's awards, visit the Award Data search page.

SBIR Phase II: Novel Camera-Projector Device Leveraging Non-invasive Registration and Projected Augmented Reality for Navigation in Minimally Invasive Spine Procedures

Amount: $1,250,000 Topic: MD

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is a novel means for providing in hospital image-guided navigation to improve the accuracy and affordability of surgical procedures. Surgical procedures, notably those involving the spine, require high levels of precision. Existing navigation tools implent more complex, higher cost disposable components, or invasive technologies that prevent greater widespread adoption especially in smaller hospitals and outpatient centers. This project aims to commercialize a novel technology that enables surgeons to project images of patient’s internal anatomy and various tool positioning directly onto to the patient’s body surface for direct visualization in real time with sufficient precision for specific operational procedures. By improving surgical accuracy and reducing complications such as misplaced implants or reoperations the objective is to improve patient outcomes with a modern navigation tool while reducing operational and hospital costs. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project focuses on developing the technical components needed for a new surgical navigation method that combines 3D sensing and light projection in an interactive and responsive manner. The technology development includes furthering software development that enables the system to analyze the position of the patient and anatomy in real-time and accurately align medical images with the patient’s body. The project will also include designing a novel manner of displaying surgical information on the skin surface in a clear and helpful manner for the surgeon within accuracy, latency and human factors requirements for clinical use. Bench validation testing will be performed to measure how accurately the system matches images to the patient, with the goal of meeting or exceeding industry accuracy standards. The end objective of this project is an operating validated prototype tested in a controlled laboratory setting, suitable for more advanced testing and commercial and clinical pilot studies. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

SBIR

Phase II

2025

NSF

Scanner Agnostic Image-Guided Biopsy Platform Employing Advanced Computer Vision and Computer Graphics to Enable Non-Invasive Registration and Dynamic Projection Mapping

Amount: $1,107,943 Topic: 102

PROJECT SUMMARY Accurate targeting during image-guided biopsy procedures is critical for the diagnosis and treatment of cancers such as lung, liver, and spine tumors. However, current CT-guided biopsy workflows rely on static 2D imaging and manual interpretation, which can lead to misdiagnosis, repeat procedures, and increased patient risk—especially in anatomically complex or mobile regions affected by respiration. This project proposes the continued development and validation of Skylight™, an innovative mixed-reality navigation platform that uses non-invasive adhesive fiducials (SkinDots™) and real-time projection mapping to guide biopsy tools with millimeter- scale accuracy. The long-term objective is to reduce diagnostic delays and procedural complications by enabling dynamic, spatially aware, and intuitive visualization of subsurface anatomy directly on the patient's body. This Phase II effort will advance Skylight’s capabilities by implementing and validating a real-time respiratory motion compensation algorithm using tracked external markers and preoperative imaging. Cadaveric models ventilated with programmable respirators will be used to simulate realistic anatomical motion and evaluate targeting accuracy across lung, liver, and spinal lesions. The specific aims are: (1) to develop and test software algorithms for tracking and compensating for respiratory motion; (2) to develop a cadaveric model with physiologic respiratory movement for system evaluation; and (3) to validate Skylight’s accuracy in guiding biopsies across common anatomical targets. The proposed system has the potential to significantly improve the safety, efficiency, and diagnostic yield of CT-guided procedures, aligning with NIH’s mission to improve health through innovative, patient-centered technologies.

SBIR

Phase II

2025

HHS

NIH

SBIR Phase I: Novel Camera-Projector Device Leveraging Markerless Skin Registration and Projected Augmented Reality Software to Enable Navigation for Minimally Invasive Procedures

Amount: $274,865 Topic: MD

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is a novel projection-based platform, enabling direct visual mapping during surgical procedures. The project aims to develop a system that directly projects images that guide surgical intervention in real time onto the patient. By enabling direct visualization and by requiring minimal consumable components, the project aims to address usability and cost barriers that hinder adoption of current surgical mapping platforms. This product targets the spinal lumbar surgical market accounting for nearly 200,000 U.S. procedures each year. Spinal surgery requires high levels of accuracy, with inaccurate interventions resulting in reoperation rates of up to 16%, and readmissions costing nearly $15 billion in both direct and indirect costs, as well as poorer patient outcomes. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop and validate a novel, projection-based, surgical navigation platform. The system utilizes three dimensional sensors to non-invasively orient to each individual patient and project visual anatomical references and guidance onto their skin surface, aiding surgeons in real time. This project will develop and validate the hardware and software to repeatably and reliably detect and align radiological images onto patients. It will also develop and validate the core algorithms needed to ensure the required accuracy and system performance suitable for surgical use. The prototype will be tested on bench-top phantoms and its performance compared to the defined industry-standard accuracy measures required for lumbar spinal surgical procedures. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

SBIR

Phase I

2024

NSF

Software Development and Cadaveric Testing of Deformable Registration Pipeline in Novel Camera-Projector Surgical Navigation Device

Amount: $294,992 Topic: NIA

ABSTRACT The purpose of this Phase I project is to build, integrate, and test a deformable registration pipeline for PRISM in order to make its markerless registration process more robust. PRISM is a camera-projector surgical navigation tool (SNT) developed by Illuminant Surgical, Inc. that harnesses advances in computer vision and sensors to provide surgeons with a seamless navigational experience. Importantly, PRISM addresses three key barriers to universal adoption of SNTs: high acquisition cost by leveraging low-cost, commodity hardware, long and invasive registration processes by building a markerless alignment algorithm that uses only surface topography, and unintuitive visualization by utilizing dynamic projection mapping to display critical guidance information directly onto the surface of the patient’s skin. Currently, PRISM has established accurate, consistent dynamic projection mapping capabilities through phantom and cadaveric testing. PRISM also has a markerless registration process in place that can align a patient’s preoperative radiological imaging with their intraoperative position to display patient anatomy directly on top of its subdermal location. However, this registration process currently takes into account only rigid transformations (i.e., translations and rotations). In order to be significantly more robust and applicable to any sort of skin-surface changes that may occur in the clinical environment between the time a patient completes a preoperative scan and undergoes a procedure, Illuminant is focusing on building a deformable registration pipeline that will be able to account for significantly more planes of disturbance in the skin surface and better predict how that impacts the subdermal anatomy. Aim 1 of this project will be dedicated to the development of deformable registration software that can be integrated into the current PRISM suite, and Aim 2 will focus on testing the deformable pipeline on cadaveric specimens. Aim 2 will also serve as a pilot study for a future cadaveric validation test that will serve as the basis for clearance from the FDA through the De Novo pathway. PRISM’s first use case is in spinal surgeries, which are often leveraged to treat spinal degenerative disease and low back pain––diseases that become increasingly prevalent in patients as they age. Given the growing popularity of these spinal procedures and the fact that they require a high degree of accuracy, tools like PRISM that provide intuitive visualization and localization of spinal structures in an easy-to-set up and affordable manner hold great promise. If funded by the NIH SBIR grant, PRISM would be the first device of its kind to achieve these capabilities and commercialize.

SBIR

Phase I

2024

HHS

NIH